Family Zone

Family Zone

Mr Andrew Hawkins – Deputy Headmaster and Head of Senior School

I have previously mentioned the company Family Zone in regards to their services and what they offer. Device use and social media are without doubt the greatest challenge facing education and families.

We are considering purchasing a school licence for Family Zone’s ‘Phone Zone’ that simply acts as a filtering system for schools and parents on 3G/4G use for mobile phones. This is essentially the same filtering we offer on our school wifi. The power the filtering offers is the ability to ‘block’ certain search engines and social media sites at various times to limit the classroom distraction. The issues schools face is that students can easily access any school wifi blocked sites on their phones. Family Zone create the vehicle for schools and families to work together and agree on suitable times for blocking.

I have attached the link to their website for you to peruse at your leisure and I have added a few snippets of their website in this article outlining their service. In an ideal world, we should as a community be in a position to say if a student’s phone is not linked to Family Zone then they would not be allowed to bring it to school. We would look to transition this over 2018 to having this a requirement for the internet agreements in 2019.